The Artist's Way

if he couldn’t be there he wouldn’t be anywhere near his
beloved music.
Stuck and stymied, Alan described his block this way: “I
try to play and I hear myself, and what I can do is so far
away from what I want to do that I cringe.” (And then quit.)
Working on his creative recovery, Alan began by
allowing himself the luxury of buying a new recording a
week. He stopped making music work and started making it
fun again. He was to buy crazy recordings, not just high art.
Forget high-minded aspirations. What sounded like fun?
Alan began exploring. He bought gospel, country and
western, Indian drum music. A month of this and he
impulsively bought a set of practice sticks at the music store.
He let them lie and let them lie and ...
Three months later, Alan was drumming on the
handlebars of his exercise bike while rock and roll blasted
through his Walkman. Two months later, he cleared a space
in the attic and acquired a secondhand drum kit.
“I thought my wife and daughter would be embarrassed
by how bad I was,” he explains. Catching himself in his
blaming, he cops, “Actually, I was the one who was
embarrassed, but now I’m just having fun with it and
actually sounding a little better to myself. For an old guy,
I’d say my chops are coming back.”
For Laura, a dime-store set of watercolor paints was her
first foray into luxury. For Kathy, it was a deluxe Crayola
set, “the kind my mother would never get me. I let myself
do two drawings the first night, and one of them was a